I suspected rail had a dodgy stick of memory ever since I set it up last summer. If I tried to run the memory at the speeds it was spec’d for, it wouldn’t count up all 12 GB during POST. By November, things had deteriorated further and I began experiencing Strange Problems (random system freezes or failure to load the kernel). Mushkin swapped out the failed stick.

My machine had been running maybe a week with the replacement stick when I once again began to experience Strange Problems. My first assumption was that they’d sent me a bad stick; but no: upon investigation, it was another stick from the original set that had failed. At this point, Mushkin acknowledged that the part I had was known to be failure-prone (well, they had hinted at this when replacing the first stick) and they offered to swap out the whole lot of six sticks. And they would even cross-ship and cover shipping both ways. Cool.

Unfortunately, the new set of six seems to have included another bad stick. After continuing to experience random system freezes, I think I isolated the problem stick: one of the lot always dumps me into BIOS setup when I boot with only it. Mushkin is replacing this stick.

Mushkin’s customer support has been pleasant to work with; and they’ve certainly stood behind their product. But I can’t say I’m satisfied with the quality control. Or is this just par for the course for high performance DDR3 memory?